Switzerlanded

[Slammer]

This is going to be as much a scathing rant as it is a light hearted story of travel and adventure, there will be ups and downs, insights with a bit of navel gazing. So brace yourself.

„Switzerlanded“
Verb. The state of shock, awe and dismay when faced with the reality of eye watering prices demanded for the most mediocre of services or goods in the confederation of Switzerland.
Coined by the venerable members of a rather active English language forum for expats in Switzerland and frequently used rather smugly by longer standing members to lord it over so-called „newbies“ who have been rendered gob-smacked after having to take out a IMF loan to pay for their bar tab.
Now there are a few things that are mandatory, being born, for one, then there is dying and the paying of taxes between the two. So this trip to Switzerland is totally my own fault and it was not forced, it is just something I had to do for my own piece of mind.
A kind of pilgrimage, so to speak.
It took a while to get things in sync but at last I had a bit of time and the moolah for at least two days in the land of the Swiss frank. As it was still a bit too early in the year for tent and LiLo, I would be staying in hotels. Now as a rule I tend to ride until my ass hurts and then look for cheap and cheerful digs, 40 to 60 Euros a night and don’t look around the room with a black light. 80 is pushing it and 90…? I´ll be walking with a 10° list for the rest of the day. The big plan was to ride, find a cheap as possible hotel, stay one night in CH before carrying on to Italy. Cheap & cheerful, you get the gist, only thing is Switzerland doesn’t do cheap and cheerful, cheerful, yes. Cheap..? No!
Come morning, a week ago, packed and ready to bug out, I fired up the ST and hit the A96 Autobahn to Lindau. Out of habit I stopped at the big Raststation on the German-Austrian border at Hörbranz for a coffee, I also needed this years Vignette for the CHian Motorway system. These things cost 40 Euros for a year, regardless if you are on a bike or in a car. Not too wild, but unlike Austria where you can buy a 10 day sticker, CH wants a years toll just for a sniff at the motorway.
Anyway, scowling into my coffee over the 40 Euros I saw her. Long of leg, small of waist, black of hair and the most glorious rack of Charlies god ever slapped on the chest of a woman. She was walking with her guy, a much older person and I can only hope the same god had granted him a big dick because he sure short-charged him on looks.
As the four of them walked past I thought to myself that I would love the chance to motorboat, only I thought in English and due to some short-circuit in my brain I said it out loud.
Only to have her feller turn on me and ask what did I say?
„What did you just say?“
„UuuuH… Wut?
„What did you just say“
„Uhhhh!“ I said feigning ignorance.
„I was bitching about the price of the vignette…. Why?“
„Nothing“ He said, not quite convinced. They walked on and she turned and I gave her a wink and a winsome smile.
Time to remount and ride. I carried on through the Pfänder tunnel into Austria and turned off at Hohenems into Switzerland where I joined the E45 to Sargans, turning right past the Fjord-like Walensee and into central Switzerland. I had planned to go over the Klausenpass to Interlaken, it had been open only the day before but now it was closed. I know that there is an alternative route to Interlaken and as I was fed up of the Motorway I decided to turn off.
But. I needed a map.
Before you start screaming „SLAMMER you WRETCHED Luddite“ I have to tell you that I do have one of these new fangled cell phones and it has google maps on it and the Interthingy and I can use it for navigation.
It is just that I have a German Aldi Prepaid card in the phone which doesn’t like to be near a Swiss cell tower as they are evil vampires and will suck out any credit on a poor Aldi card in seconds, even when riding along the Austrian Motorway adjacent to the Swiss border… As soon as a Swiss cell tower sees my phone, it´s a case of Schwupp and my phone is out of credit until I can reload at the next German Aldi.
Needless to say I switch the thing off as soon as I get within sniffing distance of CH. But secretly I wanted a map, I love maps, real maps, one out of paper, the kind that you can fold in twenty ways but only one is correct. A map that you open over a table with a beaker of coffee, to gaze over the colored lines with a steely eye, imagining where I could go next. So very old fashioned, but I do love me a good map.

I…just…needed…to…find…one!

I stopped at the next petrol station and went to the desk and asked for a map….
The girl behind the counter looked at me with that odd look teenagers give to old folks like me get when we talk in ancient.
„A what?“
„A…Map“
Another strange teenager look, the kind that you get when they have to think a thought they hadn’t budgeted for.
„A…a…Map, like on google map?“
„Yes, but on paper“
„You have it on your phone“
They did not have any maps and she clearly had no idea what I had just asked for.
„Sigh“ It wasn’t worth it.
I rejoined the Autobahn for a few Kilometers but soon came to an exit where I turned off, in the next village, I found a Papeterie that stocked books a few writing utensils, magazines, art-paper, things like that and… maps!
It was a good feeling to ride off with a real red map stuffed behind the windshield, I basked in the admiring glimpses from bikers coming the other way when they saw my map.
I have a map, it made me feel so, so… *sniff* Twentieth century!
But by now it was getting late and cold to boot and this twentieth century man was beginning to feel his age.
I needed a hotel, a shower, then something to eat washed down with a few beers.
Remember the cheap ´n cheerful?
The first hotel I stopped at, a three star jobby, nothing spectacular, nothing I would write about with a feeling of rapture. It was just a simple generic, garden variety hotel, in the middle of nowhere on a side road to Interlaken.
The room was 225 Franks, or 250.96 USD
Switzerlanded.
Wordlessly I turned.
„We have cheaper rooms… 170 Franks a night, but they don’t have a bathroom en suite.“
Switzerlanded.
„No thanks!“



The Rhein crossing at Liechtenstein



The mighty fortress at Vaduz



A break at Vaduz



Rheinbridge


Walensee


Like Norway


Brienz, view from the hotel.


On the road to the Eiger

 

[Willsmotorcycle]

Motorcycling and motorboating, your focus is to be envied.

 

[Slammer]

The next two hotels were not much better but in the end I settled for a room in a Hotel in Brienz for 120 Franks a night, it had a bathroom and a loo and a bath though, so no danger of going bump in the night in the hallway against anything unyielding on my three o clock constitutional pee.
Looking around my rented digs I think that you paid for the view, which was spectacular by the way, because the room was rather standard, double bed, chair table, cupboard, dresser. I showered the road of myself and an hour later went to the restaurant where I took the cheapest meal on the menu, literally three bites of meat and a handful of potatoes and what looked like a 3D printed cartoon mousefart but in fact turned out to be a cauliflower. Three beers and 85 Franks later I turned in for the night.
It´t not just that I am a cheap ass Charlie, well I am but that is beside the point. Somehow over the top prices simply grate me the wrong way, I have been places where you get ripped off because any foreigner is a rich foreigner, but as long as it a gentle rip -off I don’t mind. Once in Armenia we took a taxi to a restaurant and paid the foreigner price, ok, so what? The taxi driver then asked if we could pay him a bit more on top because he has glaucoma and needed treatment. Let me write that again, slowly! Our taxi driver was blind as a bat while bombing through downtown Yerevan….
It was all on expenses so he got a good tip by the way.
Its the blatant rip-offs like the 12 Euros for a coffee in Milan, for instance, now that is a different matter.
Switzerland, well its just expensive without wanting to rip you off intentionally. It is the county where „If you have to ask the price, you cannot afford it“
But I had something to do here you see.
I was on a mission.
Many years ago my parents got married in Blackburn and on their honeymoon they both rode on my dads Norton on a trip through Europe. Now this is in the late fifties mind you where Pan European travel way not yet a thing, but they did it. I have the picture to prove it, taken by my mom of my dad jauntily leaning on the Norton at the railway station in Grindelwald, I wanted to go there and try to recreate the picture.
Two hours after leaving the hotel I pulled up at Grindelwald station and looked for the exact spot, not a lot has changed in the last 60-odd years, more houses, more tracks, but the shed is still there as is the Hotel Belvedeu on the top of the hill. They were my points of reference .
I looked for the station master in his office where I showed him printed copies I had made of the picture and asked for his help.
He was only too willing and opened the gates in the barriers, allowing me to ride the ST over the tracks to find a spot that was not exactly where the original picture was taken, but close enough for me to feel happy.
Then it hit. I was where my parents had been the year before I was born, the year before everything.
I could no longer hold back and broke down in tears.
An hour later I had done all the pictures I would ever need and rode up to the Hotel Belvedere where I sat on the balcony sipping a coffee and drinking in the view it offered of the Eiger, the whole time I stayed there my mind was a total blank.
As I rode out of Grindelwald I felt a chill down my spine, somehow it felt so final, as if I could sense that I would not be back here ever again.

Setting a course to the south I rode along narrow back roads flanked by high mountains under a cerulean blue sky until I reached the railway station at Kandersteg with its car train from Canton Bern to Kanton Wallis, I loaded the bike on the train and waited in the ancient rolling stock carriage for the 40 minute trip to set off.
The plan was to leave Switzerland over the Simplon and head down to Domodossola and the gateway to the great North Italian lakes, spend a night on the shore of Lago Maggiore then head over to Lago Lugano and a campsite at Porlezza, they have nice cabins there and I wanted to spend a night and a day before heading back.
Now Switzerland is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but as soon as you leave and ride down into Italy everything changes, it gets warmer, for one, more breathable, at least for me, the air is charged with the heady scent of flowers mixed with pine trees and I began to relax, I love riding in North Italy, especially when you get the chance to leave the Autostrada and use the many narrow winding roads off the beaten track, you ride under leafy trees and impenetrable mountainous forests on some very old roads, you ride past villages stuck to the side of cliffs with nothing more to hold them there other than the prayers of the inhabitants, you ride over rickety old girder bridges that cross wild mountain rivers that have spent millennia cutting their beds in deep gorges. Some stretches in the road are so narrow that centuries ago two donkeys would have had to squeeze past each other, they were just as wide as two asses asses… So to speak.
I reached Cannobio on the shore of the lake and went to a hotel that I have used before. This was one of the 50 Euro cheap and cheerful hotels I have mentioned before. It is the kind of hotel that tour busses regularly use to supply their tonnage of pensioners on their three day trip of a lifetime with room and board on the cheap.
Only this time they wanted 110 Euros, I managed to haggle the receptionist down to 90 Euros and went to my new room. This hotels theme is the so-called „Shabby Chic“ a style that I have never managed to understand, to me it looks merely shabby without any of the chic, it had a great view over the lake though and with a quarter of red and a pizza I watched the setting sun light up the mountains on the other side of the lake in hues of red and yellow.
At some point in the night a tourbus had arrived with a fresh cargo of German pensioners and they were all in the dining room the next morning waiting to be fed, I got a coffee and watched the two girls finish making the breakfast buffet, when they were satisfied they gestured to the assorted pensioners, who, with a collective groan and creaking mixed with a sound like popping blister foil they stood up to a clickety-clacking of crutches and Zimmer frames as they made their laborious way to the buffet.
It was like watching an episode of the Breakfast of the Living Dead, I did not want to get in the way of starving pensioners so I waited for the first flush to shuffle back to their tables before getting my own grub.
I spent breakfast watching the weather report and it did not look good, a series of depressions was coming in from the Atlantic and the forecast was for heavy rain and thunderstorms, both for the north of Italy and the south of Germany, in fact a weather warning was in place for Bavaria. I was feeling a bit depressed myself and decided to cut this trip short.
Finishing my breakfast, I paid for the room then held my breath and clutched my wallet close to my chest before dipping back into CH. Perhaps it is just me but paying over the top prices tends to suck out all the enjoyment I get out of a trip, in the end though I had gotten what I wanted and now it was time to go home.
I set out under lightly cloudy Skys, but the more north to the Bernadino I got, the more the clouds darkened. The high pass was still closed, I noticed, so instead of leaving the Autobahn for the high pass at the Raststation at the south entrance to the tunnel I stopped for a coffee and to top up the tin tank and empty the meat tank, among the cars and busses and trucks A group of bikers with plates from the town of Ulm were taking a time out and I strolled over for a chat. Seems they were worried about the weather too and had cut short a tour of the lakes. Nice bikes though, all top of the range BMW´s, not one older that two years, they were kitted out with all the farkles and bling you could buy and every one of them had April to November season plates. I decided I did not care for these bikers when one looked at my trusty ST with its all year plate, flaky, rattle can paint job and parts hanging on with tie wraps and duct tape, he remarked that it looked well traveled. I took that as an insult in the way he said it, much like the humor, German insults can be very subtile.
We had nothing in common, so I walked back to my bike and drank my coffee, as I watched, some workmen changed the red closed sign to a green open one, I went „Yippeee“ to myself, drank up but before putting my helmet on I called over and shouted that the pass was now open.
It looked as if they had started to hold a committee meeting as I pulled out of the Raststation, I did not see them again and I could only imaging that they took the easy way and went through the tunnel. Later on when I was wet and cold I cheered myself up imagining them huddled in fear of the rain under a bridge frantically polishing rainsplatters from their machines.

It is an easy ride to the summit where I spent an hour without a single thought in my head. It is a strange other worldly sensation to be all alone on the saddle of a high mountain pass in a wintery landscape, in the claustrophobic icy fog your senses are heightened, your modern mind with all its knowledge of the natural world starts to see and hear things that do not exist. There are no sounds of nature, no birds, no buzz of insects, all sound becomes subdued, muted. The skittering crack of a rockfall makes you jump and the fog begins to form sinuous tendrils that kind of writhe. No wonder people throughout the ages have populated the tops of mountains with gods and Trolls and demons and all kinds of supernatural creatures.

But it is all true though, they are there, you just know it, they are waiting, in the darker shadows, just out of sight in the corner of your eye.

All to soon though it started to get darker and colder and ice crystals began to form a sheet on the road, I shook myself out of my thoughtless revere, the ice-king wanted me off the mountain and it was time to go.
I rejoined the autobahn and headed to Sargans, just before the turnoff to the Austrian border I saw the first drops of rain on my helmet, just spitting for the moment, but the black clouds were coming in thick and fast and it wasn’t long before it deluged, another two and half hours before I got home and a hot shower.
At Kandersteg


Trains a coming.


And off we go.


at the top of the Simplon


Not too much snow for this time of the year.


Nice all the same

Don´t we look good?


In the realm of the ice king


getting spooky



Time to go.

 

[Slammer]

The prize.

 

[STFlips]

Slammer, thanks for sharing that story and photos, both were great. I enjoy your writing style and humour, and admire your sharing of this personal adventure.
Keep on riding and writing friend, so we can enjoy and dream about places we have not yet visited.

PS just saw the old and new pics, wunderbar!

 

[Slammer]

And some more from Italy and one of the Bernadino, the one where I knew it was time to go.

 

[Kevcules]

Good story. Where is the picture of the black haired well built goddess being followed around by Frodo?

 

[Slammer]

Good story. Where is the picture of the black haired, well built goddess being followed around by Frodo?

Too dumbstruck to pull a camera. But imagine a cross between Gina Lollobrigida in her best days and Denise Richards. The kind of girl you want by your side as you drive your E-type Jag along the cliff side roads of Cinque Terre and she has her fingers in your chest hair toupee while gasping at your manliness.

 

[Sadlsor]

Great story, @Slammer !
Making for a great read, embellished with your Teutonic viewpoint.
My takeaway (I can relate to actually seeing these people) from Post #1 ...
"Another strange teenager look, the kind that you get when they have to think a thought they hadn’t budgeted for."
Calls for that line from Don Henley's "If Dirt Were Dollars", the one including the word "uncomprehendingly."
Excellent write-up, and my thanks for sharing!

 

[Upt' North]

Slammer you brought it on yourself, you know what those Swiss are like. But great that you built on your memories.
Vignette is a rip off, if you ride on one motorway for one hour, you have to have a yearly pass. No wonder they can afford to cut the motorway grass.
I won't stay in Switzerland ever again, Southern Germany, Austria and the South Tyrol are all better options. For better, read; cheaper, great food, great wine you can afford and folk who don't treat you like poor relations. Hell, I'd even prefer to stay in the French Alps, I know!
Thanks for the pictures. Nice write up.
Upt.

 

[Upt' North]

Please excuse me photo bombing you. But Lugano is worth another mention. Make sure you stay on this side and wave at the mugs on the other side. This side being the Italian side.
Sweet memories.

 

[Uncle Phil]

When I rode in the Alps, I came up Stelvio and crossed over into Switzerland at the top.
Nobody at the Swiss crossing, so I never got a vignette when I went through to Umbrail Pass.

Uncle Phil - Alps 2008 Day 11

I stayed in Andermatt and rode the passes in the area for several days.

 

[rwthomas1]

Fantastic write-up. Had me laughing my azz off. Pretty sure you can download any area on Google maps and access it offline. I do that when I know I'll be out of cell tower range but need nav....

 

[Slammer]

Fantastic write-up. Had me laughing my azz off. Pretty sure you can download any area on Google maps and access it offline. I do that when I know I'll be out of cell tower range but need nav....

Still prefere a map though.

 

[diferg]

"No signal!" "Unable to navigate destination from this location"! These are statements you Never see on paper maps.
Great write-up! unfortunately, it also sounds very real life.

 

[ChucksKLRST]

Wonderful ride and write up. Great pictures. O how I miss riding over on your side of the pond. Really enjoyed my two times riding the Alps. 2017 and 2019. Maps? I too need to have my paper maps even though I had a SD card of Europe for my GPS.

 

[wingdoc5]

Outstanding report!!

 

[John OoSTerhuis]

Great writing and pictures! Thank you for sharing with us, much appreciated. Being an old Infantryman and Aviator I also must have a proper paper map to confirm (or ID the GPS’ lie) directions.

That has to be the beST opening line I’ve read in a trip report. Bravo! And cerulean is indeed my favorite blue.

BeST, John

 

[Moto-Charlie]

Great write-up. I know most of the areas and roads you traveled - it was fun to follow along. I particularly liked your "Prize" photos - very cool to be able to visit history and trace where your parents went all those years ago. I did a similar thing a long time ago on my first motorbike trip to Europe when I visited some specific places where my Dad had lived and served in France and England in the Airforce during WWII. Met some very nice people back then that still had strong memories of the war.

I'll be heading over to the Alps in a few days. I'm likely to take the same Kandersteg car train you took. I recollect that the last time I took it you ride in headfirst and then you have to turn the bike around inside the car to face out again to exit - not easy to do with a big bike. Looks like you may have had to do the same thing. Great looking bike.

Glad you had a safe and enjoyable trip.

 

[Slammer]

Great write-up. I know most of the areas and roads you traveled - it was fun to follow along. I particularly liked your "Prize" photos - very cool to be able to visit history and trace where your parents went all those years ago. I did a similar thing a long time ago on my first motorbike trip to Europe when I visited some specific places where my Dad had lived and served in France and England in the Airforce during WWII. Met some very nice people back then that still had strong memories of the war.

I'll be heading over to the Alps in a few days. I'm likely to take the same Kandersteg car train you took. I recollect that the last time I took it you ride in headfirst and then you have to turn the bike around inside the car to face out again to exit - not easy to do with a big bike. Looks like you may have had to do the same thing. Great looking bike.

Glad you had a safe and enjoyable trip.

No, actually it is straight in and straight out again, you´ll see.
Be sure to go to the loo first as the ones on the train are locked.